Meet the 2-billion-year-old giant that stretches 14km long, towers nearly 3km into the sky, and hides a hairy carnivore

If you’ve never heard of Mount Roraima, here’s your sign to look it up. This ancient flat-topped mountain, a type of formation known as a tepui, straddles the borders of Venezuela, Brazil, and Guyana and is one of the most otherworldly places on Earth. It is 14 kilometers (8.7 miles) long, almost 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) wide, and rises almost 2810 meters (more than 9200 feet) into the sky. It looks like something out of a fantasy novel.

Arthur Conan Doyle had the same thought. In 1912, he was so inspired by explorers’ reports of these floating giants that he wrote The Lost World, a novel about scientists who discover living dinosaurs on a remote plateau. His muse was the tepuis.

Mount Roraima is made of sandstone that was laid down as long as 1.7 to 2 billion years ago, during what geologists call the Precambrian Guiana Shield. To put that in perspective, the dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago. The first complex animals appeared about 600 million years ago.


This rock was already ancient at that time. Erosion over billions of years stripped away the surrounding landscape, leaving behind these huge tabletop plateaus with sheer cliff walls dropping hundreds, sometimes thousands, of feet straight down. The word “tepui” comes from the Pemon people, the Indigenous people of the region, and means “house of the gods.” When you see a picture, that name makes perfect sense.

Sky islands: when isolation creates something new
The cliffs are very steep, and the summits are very remote, so the tops of tepuis have been evolutionary islands for millions of years. The species that got up there were gradually cut off from everything below and continued to evolve by themselves. This results in a remarkable concentration of creatures and plants found nowhere else on Earth.

According to NASA's Earth Observatory, about one-third of the vegetation found across all tepuis is endemic, meaning they exist only there and nowhere else. Up to 25 percent are confined to one mountain. Roraima, in particular, is home to creatures that are found nowhere else on Earth.

A study in Herpetological Review found that species assemblages were distinct at different elevations on Mount Roraima, with no overlap between species at the summit and those at the base. Several species of frogs from the genus Oreophrynella have been found nowhere else but these cloud-shrouded summits.

Meet the hairy plant that eats its visitors
Of all the bizarre life on Roraima’s summit, no species is perhaps more quietly dramatic than Drosera kaieteurensis, a carnivorous sundew native to the tepuis of the Guiana Highlands. It’s a tiny, bright red, and deadly thing if you’re an insect.

The leaves of the sundew are covered with tiny hair-like tentacles, each tipped with a sticky, glistening droplet. An insect settles on the plant, drawn in by its bright color and sugary scent, and is instantly trapped. The hair folds in slowly, releasing digestive enzymes and dissolving the prey. It then sucks up the nutrients directly.

Why do they eat bugs? The rocky, rain-washed soils at the summit are very low in nitrogen and other minerals. A study in the Annals of Botany demonstrates that the photosynthetic efficiency of sundews is significantly improved when they successfully catch prey. Carnivory is not a quirk; it is a survival strategy in an environment where the soil simply cannot supply what the plant needs.

Why should this matter to you
In a world of accelerating biodiversity loss all around, places such as Mount Roraima are irreplaceable. They are not just bucket list destinations for the adventurous; they are living libraries of evolutionary history. If you are in the US, you think of Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon as the gold standard of natural wonders. Roraima is in a whole different league. It’s not only old. It's older than dinosaurs, and it continues to develop, concealing secrets that scientists are just now beginning to discover.